@inbook {10378, title = {A Note on Converbs in Egyptian and Coptic}, booktitle = {Afroasiatic Studies in Memory of Robert Hetzron}, year = {2009}, pages = {95{\textendash}105}, publisher = {Cambridge Scholars}, organization = {Cambridge Scholars}, address = {Newcastle upon Tyne}, abstract = {The term and its diffusion. The converb, in its vaguest and least critical, also least specific resolution - cf. the notorious conceptual muddle involving -ing forms and constructions in English - is used as meaning {\textquotedblleft}adverbial verb form{\textquotedblright}, or {\textquotedblleft}verbal adverb{\textquotedblright}; see the subtitle of Haspelmath and K{\"o}nig (eds.) 1995.; mostly and for long it has been known as {\textquotedblleft}gerund{\textquotedblright}. Definitions reveal the underlying blurredness: Haspelmath (1995:3ff.): {\textquotedblleft}Non-finite verb-form whole main function is to mark adverbial subordination{\textquotedblright}; Nedjalkov{\textquoteright}s (in Nedialkov 1995) is more sophisticated: {\textquotedblleft}a verb-form which depends syntactically on another verb-form but is not its syntactic actant, that is does not realize its semantic valences{\textquotedblright}: this is surely unsatisfactory, for the converb is arguably actantial in cases like {\textquotedblleft}start walking{\textquotedblright}. Probably the worst is the definition in Himmelmann and Schultze-Berndt (eds.), 2005:60 {\textquotedblleft}we use the term converb for {\textquoteleft}participles{\textquoteright} which are used primarily as adjuncts{\textquotedblright}. As Gr{\o}nbech 1979:35 says of Turkic postpositions and gerundial forms, the converbs are {\textquotedblleft}fluid and hard to hold on to{\textquotedblright}, which, for a {\textquotedblleft}cross-linguistically valid category{\textquotedblright} (the title of Haspelmath and K{\"o}nig (eds.) 1995, in which see Haspelmath{\textquoteright}s and K{\"o}nig{\textquoteright}s own contributions), is not an ideal condition.}, author = {Shisha-Halevy, Ariel}, editor = {H{\"a}berl, Charles G.} }